Some more thoughts on augmentation. Michael Lascarides directs us towards Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond weblog, which devotes extensive space to augmented reality, tracking product and project announcements. Check the French company Total Immersion and their new announcement of a partnership with Microsoft, for example. The company specialises in creating an 'interactive experience where virtual components are dynamically merged into a live video stream in real time' - trade fairs quake with anticipation. Sure, there'll be a market for animated baseball cards, or even Franklin Mint produced Star Wars HoloChess and Battleships (tm), along with a myriad of other quasi-virtual family games that will be the yard sale detritus of the near future and our grandchildren's kitsch collectables.

But as Sterling usually concludes, the more interesting applications of AR appear to be mobile, where the layering of information atop of a small user-controlled section of reality - as opposed to media that envelopes you entirely - is practical, desirable, and here right now. The future dreams are still of people plucking dreamily at thin air, but little apps like Layar (which we've finally tracked down thanks to some Android ROM-flashing shenanigans) make a case for genuine usefulness. For example, the Archinform Layar promises to merge an international architecture database with your phone as the portal, bringing up information about the world around you. Throw in Pevsner and things start to get interesting.

The idea of a portal is key, be it a phone or personal projector, rather than the suggestion of data saturated landscapes generated by special glasses or headsets or whatever. We'll pitch in with a suggestion for a name. The history of technology is also the history of linguistic reappropriation - things get new meanings in the digital realm, loosely based on their function and appearance in the real world: tabs, layers, skins, windows, panes, palettes, panels, buttons, boxes, forms, paths, etc. etc. The lorgnette seems like a good match, something you hold up to your eyes to make something a little clearer.

See also, The Lorgnette, or Studies of the Town, by an Opera Goer (1854) / the Optical Heritage Museum.

*
More archives continue to drip out of the world's media repositories: Tomorrow's World, which we're partly being invited to laugh at and point at the fashions and the goggle-eyed optimism and hopelessly backwards, unoptimistic or great but wide of the mark predictions (as Maggie Philbin recalled). A shame, as always, that the whole programmes aren't just indexed and uploaded.

There's a bit more from the late Rex Malik, featured in that last TW clip, here. Prescient stuff (it's undated, but the show 'The Computer Programme' went out in 1982): 'Does this mean there's a kind of electronic Big Brother waiting out there in the future? Well, yes, I'm afraid there probably is. For the technology is now beginning to place awful temptations in front of administrators..... we need to be able to control what is held on computers, who has access to it and how they can use it.' On the future office and the role of technology: 'So you have problems with the office next door? Well just wait. I can see you having similar problems in the Eighties but with offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, London and Melbourne. As I say, welcome to the electronic village.'

The British Library Sound Archive are mostly free to peruse. The blog is good for actually tracking down sounds you can play (which, infuriatingly, isn't many of them).

Labels: computers, mobile, technology

posted by things at 23:17 / 2 comments